Study for "Bathers at Asnières"

Northwest of Paris in the early 1880s, Asnières was where the city's factories met the river. On a day off a working man could take the train out and rest on the bank of the Seine, with the chimneys of Clichy smoking across the water. Seurat, then in his early twenties, decided to make that ordinary scene the subject of a canvas nearly two metres tall. He worked the opposite way from the Impressionists around him. Rather than finish a picture outdoors in one sitting, he went to the riverbank and laid down small oil sketches on little wooden boards, which he called croquetons, then built the large composition slowly in the studio. This is one of those field studies, a quick note of colour and the placing of a figure. The Salon jury turned the finished canvas down in 1884, and Seurat showed it instead at the first exhibition of a new society of independent artists that same year.